"I will paint myself because I am often alone, because I am the subject I know best," confessed Frida Kahlo, who obsessively shared physical suffering through her canvases (a traffic accident in adolescence that condemned her to a ineffable chronic pain, thirty operations, the amputation of a leg...) and emotional (the turbulent relationship with her unfaithful husband, Diego de Rivera), as a way to rediscover peace and perhaps hope. Making life a work of art is the way in which many artists challenge their inner disorders, leaving intimacy open to the elements, exposed to the gaze of others.
The art of the inner life is as old as art itself, that is, life, although there are more and more creators who, without shame and with honesty, with an open heart, bare their privacy, even the most abject or shamefully unspeakable. . The British Tracey Emin exposed the ruins of four nights of sex and drunkenness (her own bed with disheveled sheets, used condoms, blood-stained panties, ashtrays full of cigarette butts...) and inscribed the names on a small tent. of all the people he had slept with, including his grandmother. And after a lifetime of longing for love, in 2015 she married a rock in her home in her French Provence. A safe and reliable partner who is always there, waiting for her, with the promise that he will never leave her alone.
There are also many wounds and bruises in the work of Sophie Calle, the French artist who, when she received an email from her lover announcing that their relationship had ended, forwarded it to 107 women so that they would do the work of answering for her, transforming the personal grief in a collective experience.
But perhaps the most extreme case is that of the Spanish Abel Azcona, who has made his personal history the material from which all his work draws. Son of a drug-addicted prostitute who abandoned him, abused and mistreated in childhood, his actions have something of catharsis and survival. And his body is the battlefield. Following in the wake of the grandmothers of performance, Marina Abramović or Yoko Ono, she left a gun at the disposal of those who are shot at daily on the networks in the form of insults or judicial complaints (the extreme right of Vox, Christian Lawyers...) to They could do with him whatever they wanted while he remained motionless on a pedestal in the Círculo de Bellas Artes. On another occasion, he tried to empathize with his mother by offering her naked and anesthetized body to anyone who wanted to use it at his pleasure for three minutes in exchange for one euro.
Azcona, who is currently exhibiting at La Panera in Lleida, has commissioned another artist to make a surrogate mother, a soft and comfortable mother whom he can hug and interact with on a daily basis with the confidence that she will never abandon him. . Before creating her own hologram, Alicia Framis rented a mannequin for a month, which she named Pierre, to combat the fear caused by living in a Grenoble ghetto. Some time later, in her new destination of Amsterdam, she hired the services of a gigolo very similar to her doll for an hour so she could give her affection to a living man.
The difference between art and life? When, overcome by her destructive jealousy, Alma Mahler decided to leave Oskar Kokoschka, the painter had a realistic life-size replica made of his lost love, a silent woman with whom he lived for months, sleeping with her and caressing her body covered in skin, sitting her on his lap at the opera and fashionable restaurants and, finally, cutting off her head in rage.
